Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

  A hydra rested atop of the tent. When I saw one, ten more resolved, and then a hundred. I picked out dark ovals among the hydras where harpy clans clustered. The big top was covered with them, thousands of chupacabras, hydra feathers twitching in the breeze, harpies flickering their wings. Not a square foot of the canvas was without little beasties crouching there. They were attracted by the lights, or the smell of the crowd, or the allure of the circus people―or all three. They could have been resting, or they could have been crouching in ambush.

  Meat Shoulders saw them too. He held his submachine gun in one hand, dangling by his leg, as useless as an umbrella in the face of a hailstorm. “What do we do?” He wasn’t the leadership type.

  A few stray harpies buzzed my ears. I felt a presence by my foot. A gremlin nudged the cuff of my pant leg. His pink rat eyes mooned up at me like a puppy longing to climb into my lap. All around us, the quiet tide of gremlins advanced toward the tent skirt. A handful scuttled around the main entrance to the tent. One of them lifted its head and sniffed the air.

  “Stay here. Don’t shoot anything.”

  Light and music flooded through the open flaps of the big top. An usher stood with his back to me, watching the show. He was the only one attending the door. Beyond him and down the corridor formed by bleachers rising on both sides, the crowd cheered on the opposite side of the tent. Between them and me, a clown stood in the center ring. He was lacquered in white paint, with a big red mouth and those goofy, spooky clothes clowns like to wear. He grasped a red hoop in one hand and held the other behind his ear. The audience clapped louder and louder as he tilted his ear to indicate that he couldn’t quite hear them yet. A little dog dressed in a lion suit complete with a tail that dragged behind it crouched, waiting to leap through the hoop.

  High above, amidst the cables and shadows, near an opening in the apex of the tent, Dracula hung upside down with his wings cloaked around him. His mouth gaped partially open. His teeth shone white, and his eyes gleamed. He stared straight at the clown.

  Meat Shoulders appeared beside me. He raised his weapon and clicked off the safety. The usher glanced over his shoulder and saw Meat Shoulders with his gun. He saw me. The sight of us must have given him a mild concussion because he stood there showing us his tonsils.

  I grabbed the muzzle of the gun and yelled something at him. People in the stands closest to us put their faces over the railing. They probably thought I was part of the show, but they didn’t look as sure about my black-clad, gun-toting companion. At the same moment, a little girl in the front row stood and pointed straight up. A loose circle of people around her raised their eyes. A woman screamed. It cut through the music and applause like a cleaver. Dracula spread his wings and opened his maw. His white fangs, black fur, and leather wings came straight from a horror movie.

  The place broke apart in people crying and shouting and shrieking. Normals leapt to their feet and knocked each other over. An athletic man grabbed his little darling around the waist and vaulted over the side of the bleachers. He landed on the usher. They tumbled in a mess of arms and legs. Meat Shoulders knocked me away from him―he was a strong guy―and rattled off a salvo toward the top of the tent. His bullets punched some holes in canvas but missed the target. Alighting at almost the same moment, Dracula dropped halfway to the circus tent floor, spread his wings, swooped, and landed ten feet from the clown. He perched on his wingtips and hind legs while grinning at the performer, a petrified rube in white grease paint. The audience screamed in sheer terror. People pushed other people. A grandma fell face first down some bleacher stairs. Across the ring, half a section of people tumbled over one another in a domino game of crying children and clambering parents.

  Dracula cantered across the ring on his wingtips and wrapped the clown in a leathery hug. The clown screamed and flailed. His little dog jumped up and down, yipping helplessly. Circus people in sequins and long-tailed tuxedo jackets and leotards rallied from backstage. The ringmaster rode out on a white stallion and cracked his whip. A juggler brandished a gaudy wooden club in each hand. A troupe of acrobats tried to usher people toward the side exits, but the crowd preferred to scream, shove, and generally trample itself.

  I charged forward. A carpet of gremlins streamed around my shoes. Some scuttled beneath the draperies that hung down the sides of the bleachers and into the darkness beneath. Others made for center ring. A hydra snaked its neck into one of the holes Meat Shoulders had poked in the top of the tent. A swarm of harpies drizzled in through another. The place had descended into hell, and it was all my bright idea.

  I scanned the madness for a red ponytail as I rushed forward. A mob of people had made it out of the bleachers and were at the mouth of the aisle between them, coming directly at me. They made it a few panicked steps toward the entrance before they saw the army of gremlins crawling toward them. The people at the front of the mob tried to stop and scream for God’s mercy or whatever. The people behind them couldn’t understand why they’d stopped. It seemed unreasonable to them. They pushed and shoved against the front people, who pushed back and did everything in their power not to move toward the oncoming rat-roaches. Some of the front people were strong and held out, others fell forward on their knees or elbows or chins. But eventually, the pressure from behind was too great and a tide of people at in back surged over those in front. The gremlins scuttled, tried to escape, bit, and screamed. They fled for the safety of the dark spaces under the bleachers or climbed the cloth drapes that hung down the bleachers’ flanks. One clambered up a woman’s long blond hair and took a chunk out of her ear. Another fastened on a child’s face and bit his tender little eye. Their hunger and panic had taken over, and they’d become the monsters everyone perceived.

  I barreled forward. I had one goal: Abbey. Meat Shoulders, good dumb kid that he was, stuck with me. We shoved and elbowed our way upstream. I tried to be easy with people, but ended up putting my palms on the tops of a few heads, straining a few necks, and shoving people away with a little too much force. Back in center ring, the circus people closed on Dracula. The juggler whacked him on his broad, black back with a wooden juggling club. The ringmaster circled and reared his noble steed. He took aim and cracked the tip of his whip on Dracula’s wing. Dracula released the clown and faced off with horse and rider. Blood and foaming saliva smeared his fangs and snout. The horse took one look and fell over backwards. A hydra tangled itself in the boa of the bearded lady. A squadron of harpies buzzed the strongman, while the lobster girl with her tragic hands and cute face batted at a gremlin seeking the safety of her skirt hem. Faced with this onslaught of stingers and fanged beaks, the performers scattered. Dracula squatted in center ring, excreted a pool of lemon urine in the hay, and leapt for the rafters. The juggler let fly one of his clubs. It struck Dracula in midair. He careened into a trapeze platform, where his wings tangled with an older aerialist perched there. They fell together, plunging two sickening stories to the hard ground below. Dracula lifted his head. The aerialist lay still.

  I elbowed my way into center ring. Dracula purred at me. The man next to him wore embroidered Chinese slippers and had thick gray hair. His dark eyes stayed closed but the twitch of life pulsed in his neck.

  Abbey appeared beside me. Her hair had broken halfway free of its ponytail, and her orange locks were stringy with sweat. She stretched a palm toward Dracula’s blood-bearded mouth. “Are you okay?”

  “He just killed two men,” said Meat Shoulders behind me. “And you’re worried about whether he’s okay?” He stood a couple paces behind away, pointing his gun at Dracula’s head.

  “Your job is to protect him,” Abbey said.

  “He attacked me once before,” Meat Shoulders said. “I’m along for the ride if he’s helping us track lawbreakers, but when it comes to regular folks, he’s a rabid animal.”

  Abbey moved between gun and bat, spreading her arms out.

  Meat yelled, “Get out of the way.”

  I grabbed his gun without t
hinking about it, ripped it out of his hands, and threw it under the bleachers. Meat jumped on me. He knew some moves. He got me in a pretty nasty arm lock before I managed to wrench my free hand under his armpit and around the back of his neck. He pushed and I pushed. We grunted and huffed. We both fell in slow motion to the ground. At that point, it became a contest of mass, and I, as the greater planet, prevailed. I wrestled him to a facedown position and put my knee on the back of his neck. He lay there and wheezed. I took some pretty big gulps myself.

  “Sorry Meat,” I said between puffs. “You’re a good dumb kid.”

  Abbey had wrapped Dracula in a horse blanket and gathered him into her arms.

  “Is he hurt?” I asked.

  “I think his wing is broken,” she said.

  “Get him outta here.” The vision of Goliath perishing in a stream of bullets was still fresh in my mind. “Take him somewhere safe.”

  Abbey stood clutching the bundle of fur, wings, and bloody fangs. She was sweat-soaked and her legs quivered. “I don’t have a car here. We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  I fished around in Meat Shoulders’ belt for handcuffs. I didn’t find any, but I did find some plastic zip restraints. I fastened them around his wrists and ankles and left him face down in the hay. I tried to think of some smart words to leave him with, but couldn’t think of any. A gremlin scuttled up and affixed its teeth to the tender veins of his wrist. I figured that’d do just fine.

  Abbey and I headed toward the side entrance of the big top. All the people had cleared out and it was pretty peaceful in there. Outside, madness had descended. Typhon Industries soldiers had arrived, clad in black armor, some tending to bodies that had been damaged in the stampede, others directing people away from the tent. A few aimed their weapons at the sky or into the weeds and squeezed off short, controlled bursts. It was pointless. The chupacabras were loose. No one would ever be able to strain the pythons from the swamps of Florida, nor dislodge the rabbits from the Australian outback, nor exterminate the rats from Bermuda. In twenty years, people would say the same thing about the blood sucking monsters of the American Southwest. Someone might be able to knock Dracula out of the sky with enough shotgun blasts, as White’s goons had already slain Goliath. But the hydras would scatter to the four winds, and the gremlins would crawl into the sewers and drainage ditches. They’d blend into the river and creep through the grasses of the ranches and kiss the cattle in their sleep. The harpies would soon be as ubiquitous as horseflies, only you’d need a titanium flyswatter.

  I shepherded Abbey away from the packets of Minutemen. I didn’t want her returning Dracula to them, and she seemed to feel the same. Sirens wailed in the distance. Traffic on the Interstate still stood at a complete halt. The lanes north of our sabotage shone with endless cones of headlights; the lanes south lay barren and dark. Cerberus’ barks echoed from far away, or maybe they belonged to another dog, or maybe a whole city full of dogs, forced to live among us without anyone ever questioning why.

  Families streamed through the parking lot, searching for their vehicles, eager to escape this nightmare circus. One figure stood still, leaning against a car at the far perimeter of the lot. The figure measured on the short side, even for a normal, had shoulder length straight black hair and feminine curves. They belonged to Tanis, of course. I led Abbey to her. I had a plan in my head to pick her up and carry her into the tent. She might get lucky and be kissed by a hydra.

  “John Stick. Time for you to meet your opposite.”

  “First, you and me are going to take our pals Abbey and Dracula someplace safe. Have you three met? Human, meet chupacabra, meet animal theologian.”

  The screams and shouts of monsters and humans filled the parking lot around us. The sirens came closer. I wasn’t sure if they’d arrive at the freeway or the circus tent first. Either way, they’d be too late. A couple of fire engines and paramedic vans pulled into the parking lot. I half-hoped they’d have Denny, the local coyote catcher, in tow. I would have liked to see his old rumpled face drop open when he saw what his future career held.

  “Get in. This place is getting loud.” Tanis said. “I’ll take you to your destiny, John Stick. And I’ll take Abbey and her furry friend to a safe house.”

  Abbey lingered by the door I’d opened for her. “Who did this?” She looked numb, like a person who’s just heard about some historical atrocity. “Who’s to blame?”

  “Blame is for people of weak moral intellect,” Tanis said to her across the top of the car. “This event was inevitable. The greater the weapon you create, the more collateral blood gets spilled. It’s a law of physics.”

  “Funny how you talk about laws, yet you seem to think you’re immune to them,” I said.

  “I am an eagle,” she said, “soaring high above it all.”

  “Watch out for flying snakes up there,” I said.

  “Just get in the car, zookeepers,” Tanis said.

  anis drove us around to the back of the big top, where a dozen or so smaller tents formed a narrow boulevard. A sign above the entrance read Side Show Alley. On each side hung placards advertising the acts found within: The Bearded Lady, Elephant Man, Lobster Girl, the Six-Legged Cow, the Two-Headed Snake. To the chupacabras, it read like either a menu or a list of potential good friends.

  Tanis drove in low gear and high speed down a dirt road off into the weeds. The terrain became rougher as we neared the river. Cottonwood boughs arched overhead. Clusters of tumbleweeds gathered among their trunks. We turned on another dirt road that traced the lip of the river gorge, heading north. In the back seat, Abbey cooed at the chupacabra swaddled in her lap. I sat crammed into the passenger’s seat beside Tanis.

  “So what now?” I asked.

  “I take you to the mountains,” Tanis said. “It’s time for you to fulfill your purpose.”

  “I don’t have a purpose.”

  “Of course you do. You’re an integer. The world is made of math. I already told you that. Why do I have to tell you everything three times?”

  “I’m a slow learner,” I said.

  “The equation was imbalanced. John White has been rounding up immigrants and building his army of men and beasts. He has amassed great wealth and power. He’s been exploiting the nature of the universe and wreaking havoc on a relatively stable system, with no one around to check his power. The Good Friends had potential, they had dedicated members, but they’re all pretty average.” She blew a raspberry. “Useless. The universe needed someone extraordinary.”

  The dirt road turned to asphalt and led us into the fringes of southernmost Albuquerque, where the houses huddled shoulder to shoulder, coveting their yards full of cast off and weeds, their cars sloughing rubber and paint, their lives of poverty and servitude.

  “I’m not extraordinary,” I said. “I’m a dullard trapped in a demigod’s suit.”

  Tanis threw her head back and moaned. She fixed her eyes back on the road a second later than I was comfortable with. “You are a very frustrating man. You only see the surface of everything. You see the river and you say to yourself, the water is very shiny. But you don’t see the poisonous snake floating beneath the surface.”

  “There are no poisonous snakes in our river,” I said.

  “My point is that you haven’t learned anything. I’ve taken you on this journey, and you’re still the same myopic man who can tell me the color of a person’s eyes, but has very little insight into the space behind them.” She sighed. “Have you even figured out the meaning of life yet?”

  “I haven’t figured out the meaning of my own left thumb,” I said.

  “You’re impossible,” she muttered.

  We drove quietly across the city, a chessboard of lights and darkness. People lit up those lights to deter burglars, thwart gangs, prevent car accidents. They represented humanity’s ugliness, our predilection to prey upon each other. We told ourselves we’d surpassed animals because we’d invented microwaves and tiaras and demolition derbies and f
ingernail polish. But in reality, our actions served no higher purpose than those of a skunk or a mite or a rattlesnake.

  Tanis broke the silence as we shot through Tijeras pass and into the East Mountains.

  “I want to give you a compliment. You probably need one.”

  “Don’t strain yourself,” I said.

  “Here it goes.” She took a deep breath. “You’re special.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  “You’re special because you don’t see an animal as a piece of meat. You saw every being that you cared for in the zoo as a luminous being, with feelings and intrinsic self-fulfilled value. You also somehow know that every one of those beings you care for so much is part of a greater cycle of sacrifice and transience. You hold that paradox in your head. You accept it and understand it and fulfill your part in it. That’s spiritual wisdom.

  “That’s what’s at stake in our world. We see animals―beings that have as much volition and integrity of spirit as we do―as objects. We reduce their suffering to an entry in a ledger. They have a utilitarian purpose and a dollar value and don’t matter beyond that. This is the ideology of a morally bankrupt race.

  “John White sees people the same way. That’s the risk: we can see all the life on earth, human and animal, as part of a capitalist equation. Or we can see it as the shimmering of God through the ethereal curtain into our crude realm. Once you stop seeing the intrinsic value of life, as John White has, you lose your humanity and your connection to the eternal.”

  “What am I supposed to do about it? I’m glad you like my view on living things, but what good does that do anybody?”

  “He asked me to bring you to him. You”―Tanis flashed her eyes from the road to mine―“have to go in there, confront John White, and make everything better. You’re liquid plumber. Your job is to flush away the evil blocking up the universe.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “I don’t tell how. I merely put integers together and see what number they make. The mathematician doesn’t control math. She solves equations. I believe that you will zero out John White. You’re his antithesis. Go in there and be yourself.”